by Paul Stewart
‘No,’ said Maris, unable to keep a sharp edge from her voice.
Linius looked at her sympathetically. ‘Yes, I know I neglected you,’ her father said. ‘And I'm sorry. I neglected all my duties … But I couldn't help myself! It was all far, far too fascinating to ignore. And the more I discovered, the more I wanted … the more I needed to discover. I am an academic, Maris, for my sins. You do understand, don't you?’
‘I … I suppose so,’ said Maris reluctantly.
‘I was this great explorer unravelling the forgotten secrets of a whole lost world,’ said Linius, his eyes burning with enthusiasm. ‘At first, progress was slow. The ancient script was difficult to read and, since it was in an archaic dialect, even harder to translate. Time after time, I had to visit the Great Library to uncover yet more scrolls to help me with my difficult task…’
He paused again, and Maris watched him turn towards the old librarian. Linius's face glowed with gratitude.
‘I owe so much to you, Bungus,’ he said. ‘It was you who first showed me the old dictionaries and lexicons. You who taught me the rudiments of the Ancient Tongue. And you who instructed me in how to use the library – which tree to climb to locate information, which branch to take …’ He shook his head. ‘If only I'd realized that you were there.’
‘Yes, perhaps I should have made myself known, after all,’ said Bungus. ‘I could have knocked some sense into that head of yours and nipped this foolhardy nonsense in the bud…’
But Linius was shaking his head vigorously. ‘Nothing could have stopped me by that stage,’ he said. ‘I was obsessed, Bungus. Intoxicated. Something incredible had taken place down in the Ancient Laboratory, of that I was convinced. I had no choice but to carry on until I had discovered for myself exactly what it was. Finally, after many long weeks, I had found out all I could from research. It was time for me to get first-hand knowledge of the Ancient Laboratory itself.’
‘But I thought it had been sealed up,’ said Maris.
‘And so it was,’ said Linius. ‘Yet my curiosity was at fever pitch. I couldn't resist going to see for myself. That was the first time I went down in the sky cage.’ He leaned forwards and his voice dropped conspiratorially. ‘I had to be so careful,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the difficulties I had manoeuvring the cage itself, I also needed to keep my destination concealed from my fellow academics. They considered it bad enough that their Most High Academe should sink to the levels of low-sky study, but if any of them had suspected I was dabbling in matters of earth-study …’ He paused dramatically, and fixed Maris with an intense stare. ‘My life would not have been worth living.’
Wide-eyed, Maris hung on her father's every word as he described his descent in the sky cage. It brought back memories of her own recent trip down to the stonecomb with Quint – and how terrified she'd been when the chain had been cut and the cage had sliced down through the cold night air.
‘Because the great floating rock had grown since the tunnel was first built,’ Linius continued, ‘twisting itself out of shape as it did so, the entrance to the tunnel was no longer aligned with the sky cage drop. It took me more than an hour to swing over towards it – but not once did I consider giving up. Finally, I managed to secure my tolley-rope to a jutting spur of rock.’
Maris nodded. In her mind's eye, she could see Quint doing the selfsame thing.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘once inside the tunnel, it benefited me that the rock had changed in shape as it had grown. For although it meant I could not trust the old map I had brought with me, it also meant that when I came to the section that had been blocked off, it was blocked off no longer. The original rock-jam had shifted to create a narrow way through.
‘It was a tight fit, and I snagged my robes several times as I squeezed my way between the jagged rocks – but in the end, I made it. And there in front of me, no more than a dozen strides away, stood the door I had seen depicted countless times already – on paper and parchment, in chalk, charcoal and sepia ink, and of course carved into the sacred blackwood.’ He sighed. ‘And yet seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, was quite different.’ He hesitated, searching for the right words. ‘It … it was the entrance to the Ancient Laboratory and I – Linius Pallitax, Most High Academe of Sanctaphrax – was the first academic to have clapped eyes on it since it had been abandoned centuries earlier.’
An icy shiver shot up and down Maris's spine. She knew just how he must have felt.
‘I walked towards the great sculpted door with my heart in my mouth,’ said Linius, his voice low and reverent. ‘I reached out. I touched the stone. At that moment, it was as if a great electric charge surged through my body. My limbs tingled. My hair stood on end. I knew I was on the brink of a wondrous discovery.’ He paused. ‘But how to open the door? How to get inside?’
‘You mean you needed a key?’ said Maris. ‘Was there nothing about one in the carvings or the scrolls?’
Linius turned to his daughter fondly. ‘You have a good mind, Maris,’ he said. ‘Had you been older when I first started out, I would have involved you in my studies.’
Maris trembled with pleasure at hearing such praise. She had been wrong before. It was her age that had stopped her father confiding in her, not her gender. She smiled happily.
‘I did come across a reference,’ Linius was saying. ‘But it was so cryptic. The door shall open to golden lightning, it said. I could make neither head nor tail of it. Only when I was standing in front of the door itself with my lamp raised did the carved stonework finally reveal its secret.’
‘What was it?’ Maris breathed.
‘At the very centre of the stone door was a circular indentation. I recognized it at once,’ he explained. ‘Calibrated compass points with an outer circle of spikes and deep grooves of jagged lightning bolts. It was a concave impression of the Great Seal of High Office itself!’
Could that have been why he quizzed me about the mosaic I made him? Maris wondered. Did he think I was on to something?
‘The Great Seal of High Office,’ Linius repeated. ‘That gold medallion with its zigzag bolts of lightning, which had been passed from Most High Academe to Most High Academe down the centuries, the Great Seal which now graced my own shoulders. I grasped it tightly and eased it into the indentation in the rock. It was a perfect fit – but the door did not spring open as I'd hoped. I couldn't believe it. It had to work. Why else would the concave carving have been made in the first place? I thought that perhaps the mechanism had seized up, or the growing rock had twisted the door frame out of shape…’
He looked up, a grin on his face. ‘Then, as I was trying to remove the medallion, I inadvertently twisted it to the right. The rock moved with it and, with a deep rumbling sound like faraway thunder, the door moved.’
Deep down in the treacherous stonecomb, Quint squinted along the gloomy tunnel. His eyes were as accustomed to the dull glow of the rock as they were going to get but it was still difficult to see where he was going. It was all he could do not to lose himself in the confusing labyrinth of tunnels. Every step he took became a commitment; every turn, a gamble.
‘Maybe I should have gone back to the surface with Maris and Bungus,’ he murmured, and was startled by the sibilant echoes that whispered back at him. Marisss. Bungusssss …
Quint sighed. The tunnel sighed with him.
‘Still, I made my choice,’ he said. ‘It's too late for regrets now. I have to keep going. Before the glister regains its strength…’
With heavy feet, Quint stumbled on. It was a while since he had seen the last black-chalk arrow pointing the way and, as with every other time this had happened, he was becoming increasingly edgy. His palms sweated. His scalp itched. What if he never found it?
Then, suddenly, there it was – on the wall at Quint's side – the very moment after he had abandoned all hope of ever finding his way again. Unless… He stopped and traced his finger round the arrow. A smile plucked at the corners of his mouth. He was still on the
right track.
‘The Ancient Laboratory,’ he murmured as he peered ahead into the darkness. He gripped the hooked pikestaff tightly. ‘It can't be far now.’
‘As I removed the Great Seal of High Office from the sunken indentation,’ said Linius, ‘the heavy carved door slid open. Though unused for hundreds of years, it glided smoothly and silently. I stepped forwards and went through the doorway. After so much striving, so much endeavour, I was finally inside the lost laboratory I had read so much about.
‘I raised my lamp high into the air, and gasped. For the vast cavern I found myself in was like no other laboratory I had seen before or have seen since. It was spectacular…’
Maris listened closely as her father continued. She wanted to remember every single detail.
‘I was in an immense, dome-shaped chamber which had been carved out of the solid heartrock. Huge glass pipes, like great twisting roots, protruded into the chamber from all round the walls and across the ceiling, while others, even wider still, sprouted up from the floor. Some of the pipes were capped. Some hung free. Most, however, branched and fanned to form a great, convoluted network.
‘At first, I thought it was like being inside a huge machine. Yet as I stood there, looking round, I was overwhelmed by the sense that this was a place which had once been alive. There was something organic about the configuration of the pipes – they were like veins or arteries, or some vast nervous system. I decided, there and then, that my aim would be to breathe life back into the great dormant chamber.
‘I didn't stay long that first visit. But I was soon back, with tar-dip torches for the walls, and buckets and brooms – as well as all the scrolls and parchments about the laboratory that I'd managed to uncover so far.
‘With the Ancient Laboratory now brightly lit, I cleaned and swept and polished until every inch gleamed like new. Oh, Maris, I can't tell you how exhilarating it all was, returning the place to its former glory …’ He paused for breath. ‘As I peeled away the layers of dirt, I discovered that the system of pipes – which I'd initially taken to be haphazard – had in fact been carefully planned. The pipes divided and sub-divided in a highly complex network through which its air-borne contents could be controlled and directed. And – as the scrolls confirmed – from the widest conduit to the narrowest filament, each and every one had been designed to perform a specific function.
‘Some of the thinner tubes had glass spheres, sparkling like ripe fruit, attached to their ends. Others had glistening, gossamer-fine nets suspended between them, while in the centre of the laboratory a cluster of thick pipes reared up from the floor like three great wood-pythons; writhing, coiling, mouths gaping. Between them was a great central pipe into which all other pipes flowed, like tributaries into the Edgewater River.
‘At the very centre of the laboratory was a raised platform, reached by a short flight of steps and surrounded by a wide array of levers, wheels and stops. Like everything else in the Ancient Laboratory, this intricate apparatus also had a purpose. All I had to do was discover what it was.’
He turned to his daughter. ‘Oh, Maris, it was all so exciting! The time sped past so fast that I was barely aware when it was day and when it was night. Countless hours I'd spend in the Great Library, checking up on the function of a specific cluster of pipes, then hurry back to the laboratory to experiment for myself – only to discover something I hadn't noticed before that sent me scurrying back to the scrolls again. I was totally engrossed in it all, Maris. Too busy to perform my other academic functions, too excited to eat or drink – even sleep became an inconvenience I thought I could do without.’
Maris nodded, but made no comment. So this was why he had seemed so distracted. She had thought he was ill or, worse, mad. She'd been so worried. Smiling softly, she leaned forwards and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.
‘My first major breakthrough came a couple of months later,’ he continued excitedly. ‘Closely following the instructions laid down in an ancient parchment I had found, I unscrewed the lids of the three capped pipes which emerged from the floor, and connected to them three free-hanging pipes which emerged from the ceiling in a triangle formation, far above my head. Then, with trembling fingers, I seized the levers at the base of the three pipes and pulled them upwards, one after the other. With the first two, nothing happened, but as the third lever clicked into place, a sudden roaring sound came from deep within all three pipes.
‘I jumped back nervously and hurried to the valve-platform. All round me, the mass of interconnected pipes had begun to creak, clatter, whistle and hiss with the air rushing through them. Initially, too, there were a lot of odd splutters and disconcerting bangs as the internal valves creaked into action and blockages were cleared. Soon, however, these random noises stopped, and all that could be heard was the pulsing sound of air being sucked in from outside and pumped round the laboratory paraphernalia.’ Linius looked up, his face beaming with satisfaction. ‘I'd done it,’ he said. ‘I'd brought the Ancient Laboratory back to life. Now it was time to carry out a few preliminary experiments.’
He sat forwards. ‘The first I performed was the creation of the sky-crystals you like so much, Maris. Red, yellow, green, purple – they are formed in the net-like structures. Then, when I had mastered that, I turned my attention to a different part of the laboratory. I made mood-salves – curious unguents, extracted from the weather, that collected in the glass spheres. The ancient academics once used them, albeit sparingly, in all their medicines. A hint of “greed”, for instance, improved the appetite, while a little “anger” was said to be a general cure-all.’ He raised his eyebrows sheepishly. ‘I, myself, developed rather a taste for “joy”,’ he admitted, and sighed. ‘It was that which kept me going during the hard times.’ He looked at Maris. ‘For there were hard times, times when I wanted to give up and never visit either the Great Library or the Ancient Laboratory ever again. And yet …’ He fell still.
‘What, Father?’ said Maris.
Linius frowned. ‘There was one carving in the Blackwood Chamber which had intrigued me from the moment I stumbled upon it. It showed a First Scholar standing in the centre of the laboratory on the valve-platform, but I couldn't make out what he was doing because the carving – uniquely in the whole chamber – had been crudely disfigured. A chunk of blackwood had been hacked off where his hands rested on the controls, as if on purpose. But why? What was he doing, and what was the curious shape hovering above him?
‘Of course I, too, had stood at that very spot, manipulating the valves in every configuration imaginable as I slowly learned how to operate the laboratory. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to concentrate the full power of the laboratory by opening the entire forest of tubes and inlet valves all at once and in the right sequence, so that everything flowed into the central root-pipe at the same instant. And so, the entity that they had managed to create eluded me.
‘But I didn't give up. I undertook weeks of new research. Hour after hour I spent up on the platform, experimenting until my eyes blurred and my hands ached from shifting the valve-levers, turning the valve-wheels and pushing and pulling the valve-stops. Exhausted and frustrated, I was finally on the point of abandoning my task for good when, all at once, I heard a tell-tale hiss of air. Scarcely daring to believe that I might be nearing my goal, I pushed the lever I was holding fully open. The hiss became a loud roar. Sparks began to course along the pipes. And then it happened!
‘A great ball of charged particles appeared in mid-air above my head, held in position by the air streaming in from the end of the central root-pipe. It sparkled and pulsed. I'd done it! I'd created a lightning-orb. Like that First Scholar before me, I had managed to harness the electric charge of the sky!’
‘The key to creating life itself,’ Bungus murmured.
Linius turned to him. ‘That's right,’ he said. ‘The creation of new life! And with the glisters that lived throughout the stonecomb, I also had the seeds of that new life. It was an opport
unity beyond my wildest dreams and I buried myself deeper than ever in my work.’
Maris looked at her father proudly. What a genius he was! So clever. So determined. She glanced round at Bungus, expecting the expression on his face to confirm her own feelings – but the old librarian was not smiling. His mouth was pursed, his brow furrowed.
‘Did you not realize what you were doing?’ he said gravely. ‘The creation of life is sacred, Linius. Tampering with such matters is sacrilege, a profanity. You should have left well alone.’
Linius's face grew long. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘I know that now. Yet all my life I have pursued mysteries. With so much knowledge in front of me, just waiting to be explored, how could I not have pursued it?’
Bungus snorted.
‘Besides,’ Linius went on, ‘I was sure I could close the valves down the moment it became dangerous.’ He looked away. ‘I underestimated my own desire to succeed, for as the experiment progressed I became increasingly obsessed. Nothing else mattered. I had to create new life!’
‘Linius, Linius,’ said Bungus softly, ‘this was the mistake the ancient academics also made. And it led to their downfall, as well you know.’
‘I do,’ said Linius, ‘but by then, I believed I was better than those early scholars. I was beginning to see where their work had gone wrong. I was convinced that, by learning from their mistakes, I could complete the experiment they had started all those centuries ago.’ He paused. ‘You see, I had got the feel of the laboratory. It was like a living thing to me. Standing at the keyboard of valves, I felt like…’